After a few hitches with the Microsoft Windows 8 certification process, the game myself, John and Tom developed in a little over 30 hours for the Global Game Jam is available for download on the Windows 8 store! I think I speak for both me and John when I say that at times the certification process was slightly lengthy and tedious at times, but we’re at the end of it now, and the game is ready for people to (hopefully) enjoy.

We are currently working on ports to both Windows Phone and Android, so keep an eye out for those in the future. In the meantime, if you have Windows 8, feel free to download it from the store. Either from the link here, or by searching for “Heart Attack”.

On a personal level, I’m very attached to XNA. XNA was my first true taste of games programming, back in 2009. I bought a book. It turned out to be Rob Miles’ XNA book. Of course, at the time, I didn’t actually know I was going to study at the University of Hull, so that was quite a bonus. I played around with it in my spare time, annoyed my A-Level Computing teacher about how C# and XNA was an extremely pleasant experience, compared to what she was teaching us (Pascal and Delphi). As time has gone on, I feel like I have learnt a lot about XNA, and can now make games (or probably more ‘experiences’) that I’m pretty happy with. I’m not going to go all out and say that it’s the most amazing thing ever, but it is an extremely good framework.

The first and foremost point is how accessible it is. You start a new project, and already the game loop is set up, the draw methods are there. All you need to do is add your game logic and populate the game loop. This is particularly good for students, or people who don’t have much experience in games programming, or indeed programming in general. Around me at University, I see lots of people who find XNA easy to use, and who have made some very nice things with relatively little effort, all because of XNA.

So now XNA is being laid to rest, what is there that is simple to use and effective? Well, there are a few things, which I’m sure have already been suggested, and will be suggested many more times. Firstly, MonoGame. I plan to write a blog on a few aspects of MonoGame I have been using over the past week, particularly over the Global Game Jam, where me and John used MonoGame to get Windows 8 support into our game. MonoGame is essentially XNA. The code you type is pretty much identical, and the results are the same. I’ve found MonoGame very easy to switch over to, and I highly recommend it if you’re looking for a similar XNA experience.

The other platform that comes to mind is Unity. Unity is actually an engine, rather than a platform, but supports C# scripting, and from what I have seen, it appears to be an incredibly powerful engine for 3D, 2D, and in between. I will be looking into Unity more in the next few months, and hopefully share some things from it. One big disadvantage of Unity, however, is that to get the full experience, you have to pay quite handsomely for it.

So, unfortunately, it appears XNA is dead. And no-one still quite knows what the name stands for. Maybe all along, it has stood for “XNA is Not Alive”. It certainly seems to stand for that now.

Apologies for the terrible pun, but I couldn’t think of anything better for a jam. Apart from a sandwich, but the organizers of the event already took that one. Over the last 3 days, me, John and Tom spent a long time over at Hull Studio School, participating in the Global Game Jam 2013. This was a great event, similar to the Three Thing Games that are so popular at our University (and rightly so). This time, we had a bit of a re-arrangement of “usual” teams, as my usual team were away or unavailable, so I teamed up with John, and one of his friends, Tom, who provided us with some great art and sound assets over the weekend.

Everything started on Friday, when we went down a few hours early to help set up for the event. This mainly involved putting the welcome packs together, so I now have expertise in taking 3 pages from one pile, 2 from another, and one page from the third pile. You never know when this might come in handy! When the event actually started to get going, we started “mingling” with other people, including more people from the University of Hull, Hull College, and Grimsby. Then, at around 5pm, the theme was revealed via a video, which was extremely interesting. I was expecting a word, or phrase to be working with, but instead, we got a sound. The sound of a heartbeat. Personally, I feel this was an incredibly good theme, as it made people think, but wasn’t too constricting.

After about 10 minutes, we had decided on a game idea, which we set about working to immediately. For the record, I’d never heard of the film “Crank” before this competition, but I’m told that it’s both a good movie, and a very similar idea to our game. After a few hours (Maybe closer to 12), we had a working game, and were pretty happy with ourselves. This continued through until the morning, and at around 10am, we decided to go and get something to eat. A few people joined us, and we ended up going for a breakfast at the Wetherspoons just around the corner. I wish I’d not looked at how many calories their large breakfast had, but I’m sure I needed every single one of them after hardly any sleep. We then proceeded to work up until 1, when our SVN repository became unavailable. As tired as we were, we gave up trying to reach it, and headed for home. A much needed shower and 4 hour nap later, and we were back, ready to get working again.

For the remainder of that day, and half the night, we powered through our “To-Do” list, crossing off everything on it. At about 1am on Sunday morning, I feel like we could have submitted it, but we kept working on it, and tweaking different features. During the night, we tried to use SCRUM, and did mini sprints to get features added, which worked surprisingly well, having a sprint review every half an hour or so. It kept everyone focused on what needed doing, and provided constant feedback on what had been completed and what the game was looking like.

Towards dawn, things started to get slower, and sleepier, until we went to McDonalds for breakfast sometime in the early morning, and sometime after we got back, I crashed. I wasn’t out for long, but when I woke up and had drunk quite a bit of water, I was ready for the “video recording” stage, which started at 1pm. The video is here for all to see, featuring a very tired me and John.

After going around and playing on everyone elses games (there were some seriously impressive games), it was time for the overall judging. We weren’t really expecting much in reality, but we were wrong. We were awarded with a “Special award” for use of “Social Media” – relating to the score sharing feature we implemented in the early hours of Sunday morning, and when the judges came back from deliberating, were awarded 2nd place. I wasn’t expecting this at all, so was extremely surprised and happy.

Overall, the weekend was a truly great event, and the game has just been submitted to the Windows 8 store. Fingers crossed it gets past certification first time around, and is released shortly!

Special mentions go to: Simon Grey, Tom, and Lindsay West for organizing such a great event, John for keeping me sane, Alex Pringle for doing the same, and a massive thank you to Lee Stott, who lent us a Windows 8 tablet to test our game on – the remote debugging was absolutely incredible!

I can’t claim to know a massive amount about Star Trek. I started watching it earlier this year, have watched about 2/3 of the Original Series, and the 1st season of The Next Generation, but I know what I like, I know what I like in Star Trek, and I know what Star Trek is. For me, the magic of Star Trek comes from exploring the universe, and helping others along the way, while discovering new things about other races. Most of this seems to have been lost in, what seems to me to be an aptly named film, “Into Darkness”.

I know the trailer is only a minute long, and probably shows off some of the more action parts of the film to get people interested, but there are two things that struck me about it; the first is that it seems to be mainly set on Earth, in London. I don’t have anything against London, per say, I love the place, but given the history of Star Trek, and the massive amount of destinations already visited, I really hope it doesn’t center on London, or a London-like city as much as is implied. The second is the amount of explosions.

There seems to be a massive amount of films recently, particularly in the “geek culture” category, that are employing this style. Partly, I think, due to the massive popularity of the Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises series. All excellent films, however, I’m a bit skeptical whether that will work in a Star Trek background.

Overall, I will be going to see the film, regardless of worries, just due to the fact that it’s Star Trek, and I hope I’m proved wrong, and that, in fact it turns out to be a great film, and does the Star Trek name justice, but for now, the teaser trailer hasn’t made me excited. I’m worried.

If we start at what is seemingly the root of these comments, Gabe Newell, he argues that Windows 8 is a “catastrophe” for PC’s, and seemed to infer that Valve porting Steam, and first party titles to Linux was a direct result of Microsoft going one step closer to a “closed” ecosystem. Using Valves’ impressive line-up of games, including Half-Life, Left 4 Dead and Portal, he claims that the success of these games lay in the fact that the Operating System of choice, specifically Windows, was “open”. To a certain extent, when Valve was first started and released their first game, Half-Life in 1998, the open nature of Windows may have helped them get a product to market, however, that argument is seemingly invalid with their later games, such as Portal and Left 4 Dead, which have also been launched on a number of “closed” systems, including the Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3. Even their original hit, Half-Life, was later ported to PlayStation 2.

This argument becomes even more invalid when presented with names of many successful games which have been developed and released in recent years on closed systems, such as iOS and Android. Notable titles include Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, and Jetpack Joyride. One possible reason for Gabe’s comments could stem from his business perspective. Valve owns the Steam platform, one of the biggest digital game distribution systems on Windows and Mac. In previous versions of Windows, mainly Windows 7 and Windows Vista, Steam has been the main “marketplace” for games, extremely popular with gamers, including myself, for a number of reasons. The new Windows Store which comes with Windows 8 is a direct competitor to this. Competition in a marketplace is both good and bad, but in the end, it’s always a good idea in business not to big-up the competitor’s product. In other words; Valve has the most to lose with a new store being introduced.

Another interesting point is that Gabe did not specifically say that Valve are porting Steam to Linux because of Windows 8. He simply inferred it. Another conclusion which can be sought from this is something which has been highly rumored in the past year; Valve are creating their own computer. Of course, Valve have denied everything about this, as any company would, but there is a lot of evidence to suggest that Valve is indeed creating hardware. A computer, or “console”, as it would most probably be referred to, created by valve would, for both performance and price issues, run on Linux. But again, this would probably be a version of Linux with a big makeover with lots of Steam integration, so that it can’t be used outside of the Steam ecosystem. So it makes sense that Valve are porting Steam to Linux now, if these rumors are indeed true. Steam is big. It has many users, games, and now supports “normal” applications. Porting operating systems, and graphical providers will take a lot of coding and testing. If Valve are serious about getting hardware out in the next 18 months, they need to get things, particularly first party games, working now to entice people. If these rumours are true, it puts an interesting slant on Gabe’s comments, as they could be creating an Operating System which would be much more “closed” than Windows 8.

Moving onto the person who has probably been the most outspoken individual in the industry about Windows 8, Notch, he discusses a different point. On an “AMA” on Reddit, he said; “If Microsoft decides to lock down Windows 8, it would be very very bad for Indie games and competition in general”. Of course, who would know better about the indie gaming industry than the person who famously created Minecraft, an internet sensation which was released in Alpha, and then took an extra 2 years after that to be released officially, and probably one of the biggest self-publishing successes since id Software’s Doom in 1993. Interestingly enough, there are some similarities in the stories of Doom and Minecraft. They were both developed by small teams, both popularised by the internet, and both were, at one point or another, offered for free. I can name many more games which are like this, and also many more which failed using this business model.

Speaking as a developer now, my general market for a PC game is very small. Unless it becomes an internet sensation, which these days takes a minor miracle, the game is not going to be a huge success. Some people I know may play it, and tell a few other people they know about it, but generally there will be a cut off point somewhere after a few thousand players at the maximum. That is with no marketing, or any help. Now, if we take into account an ecosystem which actually encourages growth, encourages developers to put their games on it, will provide thousands, if not millions of users eager for new and exciting games, and will market games, surely that gives a much better environment for a indie development than the previous model. Of course, the model I am talking about is the existing stores; iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and now Windows. As I mentioned before, there have been many successful games and apps on these stores, which I doubt would have made the mainstream any other way. We can even look a little closer to home, and see Sheerware Games’ Shear Carnage , which has over 11,500 downloads from just one store. Again, I would say that this “closed platform” helped a lot with their success.

The thing that I find strangest about Notch’s comments is the apparent hypocrisy surrounding them. Another quote from him says “I hope we can keep a lot of open and free platforms around“. And yet, his game, Minecraft, has an impressive platform list, which includes closed platforms, including iOS, Android, and Xbox Live. Not to mention this tweet from May, when Minecraft was officially launched on Xbox Live. Notch’s views seem to jump around a lot with regards to what is an open platform and what is a closed platform, and what is good, which makes drawing a conclusion from his many comments extremely difficult. All I can positively gather is that he dislikes Windows 8.

Taking the new comments from the article I read earlier, Miles Jacobson said; “I think it’s very confusing for the market to have two different options in one”. He is referring to the fact that there are two options, or “flavours” of Windows 8. Windows 8 Pro, and Windows 8 RT. There are massive differences between the two versions, but essentially the differences come down to the two different types of processor. Windows 8 Pro will run with x86 architecture, whereas Windows 8 RT will run on ARM architecture. Because of the two different types of architecture, there are big differences in what each Operating System can do. Traditionally, Windows has only run on x86 architecture, and so all of your Windows computers, whether desktop or laptop, are running on this. The ARM architecture, however, is much more portable, due to using less power, which makes it perfect for portable devices, such as phones and tablets. Chances are if you have a tablet or a smartphone, it’s running on an ARM processor.

What Microsoft has done is the opposite of the direction Apple went in the first place; to create a common user interface between its portable and “desktop” systems. Apple did later try and bring its experiences closer together, featuring a store and icons similar to those in iOS on its OSX releases. When Apple did that, little fuss was made about the store or how the experiences looked similar, yet now Microsoft is doing essentially the same thing, a massive outcry seems to be happening. And, in my opinion, most of it is for no reason. If you have Windows 8 Pro, you can continue to use just about everything you used on Windows 7 (the only compatibility issues I’ve had so far have been with the Windows Phone 7 SDK, which most common users will not be using, and has since been replaced with the Windows 8 SDK). This includes games, programs, any “exe” file type. Buying a Windows 8 upgrade in a store cannot be confused with Windows RT, as the only distribution method will be coming pre-installed with tablets.

I do feel like Microsoft can take some of the blame for this confusion. When announcing their official tablets, the Surfaces, they did little to explain the differences between “Pro” and “RT”, and that they are in fact totally different Operating Systems for totally different architecture, however, in the same breath, I feel like I must say that it doesn’t take much to explain “Windows RT = Tablets, Windows 8 = Desktops and Laptops”. The fact that there are essentially two modes to the new Operating System is a key point. Both of Microsoft’s plans, and of people’s fear of it.

Overall, I feel that Windows 8 is in no way a catastrophe. If anything, it is a new beginning for an era of smaller development teams succeeding, and I can’t see that being a bad thing in any way.

A few weeks ago, I submitted an app to the new Windows 8 Store, and because of this, was invited to the Windows 8 Elite Programme. Other notable members of this elite are Danny and Rob. The Windows 8 Elite programme gives us opportunities to go to development days, talks, and much more. The first of these was actually on the 26th October, for a special Windows 8 launch party. Unfortunately, due to work and (mainly) Three Thing Game, we weren’t able to attend that, however, yesterday’s event wasn’t an opportunity to miss.

We were invited to a special event with Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer. Of course, me and Danny jumped at this chance, and I’m really glad we did. The train journeys were long, going from Hull to London and back in one day, but it was well worth it. We arrived at Modern Jago, a “creative space” in London, near Shoreditch, where Microsoft seems to have set up “base camp”, as it were. Waiting inside were about 100 members of the Windows 8 Elite, packed into a room, waiting for the main event.

After a brief introduction, the main man himself came on stage (albeit with a few technical issues, to which he said “I don’t know what the problem is, but I guarantee it’s nothing to do with Windows”, and talked for about 30 minutes. I’ve watched many speeches in my time, many conferences, and the like, and I can honestly say I’ve never quite seen anything like what I witnessed yesterday. Steve Ballmer has a massive reputation on the internet, for his passion about what he does, and how that is translated into his speaking, most notably in the famous “Developers, Developers, Developers” video. He didn’t quite go as all-out as that yesterday, but the only word I can find to explain quite what it was like is “inspiring”. Simply inspiring.

He talked about the challenge of approaching a market with a totally re-designed product, the integration of different Windows products, how that helped us, and how it helped everybody. It put a lot of doubts that were in my head about Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 to a rest. Once choice quote that I managed to remember and tweet was “Windows 8 is not an Operating System. It is a definer of a whole new type of device.” He also talked about how Windows 8 tried was trying to appeal to everyone. I can’t quite quote this, but paraphrasing; “You shouldn’t have to have one device for work, one device for play. Work and play should be intertwined, and that’s what Windows 8 is offering.”

After this event, I have so much more respect for Steve Ballmer, and he has really inspired me to go out and hopefully make some better apps for the Windows framework. After Steve had finished talking, we got the chance to go around Modern Jago playing with different Windows devices. Of course, I jumped straight to the Microsoft Surfaces, and had tried them out a bit more. They really are lovely devices, and I was incredibly impressed with the touch type cover, although the type cover was extremely nice too. With only £10 different between the two, I think I’d probably go for the type cover, just because it feels more like a “proper” computer that way.

The other notable device I had a play with was the new Nokia Lumia 820. I’ve been a bit skeptical of this device since it was unveiled. I felt that Nokia were slightly ditching the style that made the 800 and 900 so beautiful and unique, and had been looking more at the HTC 8X, however after using one yesterday, I’m happy to say that the Lumia 820 is even nicer than the current 800 and 900. The screen is bright and beautiful, the curves on the bodywork are gorgeous, and I hope to own one in the near future.

Overall, I’m extremely pleased that I took the chance to join the Windows 8 Elite, even if just for this event, I got to see the CEO of Microsoft talk, and it has put my mind to rest about a few of my doubts with Windows 8. I also had a great day out in London, and any trip to London is always good.

Pretty simple, I thought. The timer construct was the main new thing, and when called, the method would look something pretty similar to this:


DateTime time = DateTime.Now;
for (int i = 0; i < time.Hour; i++)
{
led.Write(true);
Thread.Sleep(500);
led.Write(false);
Thread.Sleep(500);
}


So I put that in, with the TimerCallback, and nothing happened. So I put a breakpoint on the first “led.Write(true);”. Again, nothing happened. The compiler didn’t hit the breakpoint. So I moved it forward to the for loop. This, it did hit. And I discovered the problem.

Every time you unplug the micro framework controller, the system clock is reset to default, which happens to be the 1st January 2009, at 00:00. Not very helpful, so I figured out how to set the system clock time. It’s quite simple:


Utility.SetLocalTime(DateTime);


Unfortunately, there is no way to set the actual current time, without connecting to the internet and getting the time from a server, although I guess that is something to play around with – maybe Rob will lend me the kit to try this out?

This started mainly because Alex, by mistake, assigned a variable to the third position in an array of a fixed size of 2. Here’s the code:

const int ARRAY_SIZE = 2;
int testArray[ARRAY_SIZE] = {0, 1};
testArray[2] = 2;
cout << testArray[0] << "," << testArray[1] << "," << testArray[2];
int i; cin >> i;

This code will compile. It will run, and then it will crash. But the thing that intrigued us is that it actually let you assign to, and read from, a value that shouldn’t have been allowed to be there.

The first thing we tried was changing the constructor of the array:

int testArray[ARRAY_SIZE] = {0, 1};

to

int testArray[ARRAY_SIZE] = {0, 1, 2};

This actually gave us a compile error, as the compiler had actually checked the size of the array while constructing it. The other thing we tried playing around with was the actual number of the array we were putting the value in. We tried a range of numbers, between 2 and 100. In the lab, it seemed to work up until somewhere between 75 and 100, where it would break for trying to access protected memory.

Through a bit of testing I just did, it seems a bit random on my machine, sometimes I get errors, sometimes none, between 2 and 1000.

And now, the bit we were intrigued about; why does this happen? Apparntly, when you ask for memory, say an array size of 2, windows will actually give you more memory than that. It isn’t intended to be used, and it shouldn’t be there, and can technically be re-assigned to something else later down the line, but it’s very interesting that Windows can throw memory out to you like that.

Overall, little experiments like this, and something Warren did in a lecture about pointing to a pointer and changing the address are keeping advanced programming semi-interesting. It’s a lot more in-depth than Programming 1 and 2 last year, and I’m glad about that. There’s a lot said about the stack, actually looking at what we are doing to memory, and thinking about it, rather than just doling out variables because we can.

8AM. I think this is when I sent Rob to get me energy drink before the judging

While designing our Three Thing Game, a few things about the industry struck me, and I’d like to share them. I don’t quite know how well read this post will be, whether it will be agreed with, or whether people may think I’m completely bonkers, but here we go.

For a bit of back reading, you might like to read Rob’s post on our week. He summed it up probably a lot better than I could, and it’s well worth a read. To go right back to the beginning, I wanted this Three Thing Game to be a more simplistic, but appealingly simplistic than our last entry. The games that came to my head at first were two arcade classics; Galaxian, and Asteroids. Another one that popped up a few hours later was R-Type. I loved these games when I was younger, and still do, but particularly remember spending a long time playing R-Type. I think all three of these games are great examples of games with such simplicity; you pick them up, and know exactly what you need to do. That was what I wanted. I think to some degree, we achieved that.

As Rob says, the project started out as a Windows Phone 7 game. This seemed natural to us. It’s very easy to get something working, and from there on, we all know what we’re doing. The platform is practically designed to be as simple as possible to get a decent game working in little time. So, away we went with our simple spec; Political Space warfare. I went away and started working on an engine. For ease of testing, I actually started this as a Windows Game, and not a Windows Phone 7 game. I got all the basics working, a camera engine that followed the player, player tilting with motion, particle engine, and a few other things. It was then that I ported it to the Windows Phone 7 platform.

This was probably around midnight on Tuesday, or Wednesday morning. After about an hour of changing the input class to accept accelerometer instead of keys, I had the first working build of TOAST on a Windows Phone 7. Little did I know, that would be the last build of TOAST in a Windows Phone 7 as well. I took the phone into University so Danny and Rob could have a go on it, and we agreed a few changes needed to be made. We weren’t very happy with it. Me and Rob went back to the computer, and played it. It was genuinely fun just to fly around what we had, which at the time was an infinite universe, an area of 24,000 x 24,000 pixels were covered with randomly generated stars, and an Earth. We would have consulted Danny about this, but he was asleep, and no amount of knocking managed to get him awake. The revelation came.

I remembered Geometry Wars. One of the biggest X-Box Live Arcade hits of all time. The control system; two thumbsticks, left for direction, and right for shooting. This game could work well with this control scheme. Rob instantly agreed with me, and so I borrowed a PC 360 game pad from Rob, and left to code it. Having coded bits and bobs using the 360 game pad already, the integration didn’t take long. A couple of hours, and I had the spaceship flying around and shooting directional bullets using the thumbsticks. It felt right. More right than the Windows Phone had. From a game design point of view, this was perfect.

This is where my rant really starts. We could have chosen to continue with the Windows Phone build of this game, and have a much worse control system. But we didn’t. We went for what felt better, however, if we were looking for a commercial development, we would have just shot ourselves in the foot. For a marketability point of view, there is almost no market for 360 indie games, or PC games. However, with Windows Phone 7, Android, and iOS, there are massive stores, which have millions of users actively downloading almost anything. The app stores on these mobile devices are absolutely brilliant, and I’m not trying to bring these down in anyway, however, because of these stores being such a success, and the userbase of these devices, this is the only market. And that’s bad.

If we were pursing a business choice, the right choice would have been to continue building for the phone. Absolutely. Games such as Sheerware’s Shear Carnage have proved this to us already, as well as massive hits which are now household names, including Angry Birds, Plants vs Zombies, and many many more. Going down this route would mean not being happy with the game design; we knew we could do better, and we knew how we could make it better. Elements which were added in later, such as zoom, would have had to have different inputs too. The fact of the matter is, on mobile devices, such as phones, there simply aren’t enough input choices to make some ideas work, and that’s fine. What’s not fine, is that that is the only market available.

Personally, I’d rather have a much better game, and that’s why I took the decision to make this a PC/360 game, with a gamepad. The physical thumbsticks, the physical buttons just make it a great game to play. People who were picking it up and playing on Sunday morning didn’t need telling how to play it; they picked up the controller, and they just knew, and most seemed to agree. It felt good, and natural. However, life in the industry isn’t always about what we personally think, and often we are pushed into making decisions based on what will sell; just look at the masses of First Person Shooters that are dominating the market at the moment. This saddens me, because it means that the better way for the game to be made may not have been the way we went ahead, in different situations.

After a bit of thought, the only real mobile device I could see TOAST working on would be PlayStation Vita, which has a vast array of input methods, including thumbsticks and physical buttons, as well as a touch screen. The lack of input methods on mobile devices wouldn’t be such an issue, I feel, if mobile devices didn’t dominate the market, but I think it’s now getting to the point where touch and accelerometer games are starting to be increasingly samey and repetitive, and not as innovative or enjoyable anymore. I am continuing to work on TOAST, and someday, it may be released for PC as freeware. I don’t really care about marketability at the moment, I just want people to enjoy this game as much as I have so far, and hopefully will continue to in the future.

Overall, I’m glad that we used the 360 gamepad to make TOAST, and who knows? Maybe there will be more of a market for small-end PC + Gamepad/360 games someday. I hope that day comes soon.

What happens when Rob Miles brings me back to reality after 7 hours programming

I think we did well. We did better than last time, at any rate. We had a basic, working game by the end of the 24 hours, and I think it’s quite fun to play. The big reveal of TOAST came late on Saturday morning, and the first people saw that TOAST wasn’t your average game about toast. In fact, TOAST is a rather big game (48,000px^2, to be precise), about universal warfare. And politics. Sort of.

To save all the random description of a game that I can’t possibly describe accurately on this little sleep, I’ll wait for Rob Miles to post the video of the demonstration we gave to the judges so you can all see for yourselves, and continue with; we didn’t win. But we came in the top 8. Personally, a competition like this isn’t about winning. It’s about having fun, a challenge, and improving your skills. In this week, I feel like I’ve learnt more about Games Programming than I have in the past 4 months. I’ve used techniques I haven’t used before, and I’ve built on techniques I have already used before.

The other things I saw from around the lab were great, too. Of note, of course, the winners, Sheerware, whose game took me right back to playing R-Type on our old tower of a computer in the 90′s, and The Infamous Two Sir’s interesting Kinect and Windows Phone multiplayer game about goldfish. While not as finished or polished as some of the other games, it’s really interesting that technology like this can integrate so well, and maybe I’ll try to do something like it in the future.

Overall, all of the entries that I saw and played were really fun, and everyone in the labs seemed to be having fun. What is the future for TOAST? Personally, I’m going to evolve it in my own time, hopefully flesh it out a bit more, and maybe lead up to a release on one platform or another. TOAST did prove something that has been bugging me for a while about the state of the games industry at the moment, which I’m sure I’ll have more energy to blog about tomorrow.

For now, that’s all. Another successful Three Thing Game. Here’s to the next one!